Protecting your content

How do you protect your content from being copied and shared? This is a challenge every product creator faces when selling his/her products. CDs and DVDs can be ripped, mp4 files posted on torrent sites, and PDFs can be shared around as easily as sending an attachment on an email. The sad truth is EVERYTHING can be copied. But, there are steps you can take to minimise the impact on your business!

1. Include a prominent copyright notice. Put a copyright notice at the beginning of the audio/podcast, video, software license or PDF.2. Brand the content by embedding your logo/brand. PDFs can be branded on every page ( see – (https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/add-watermarks-pdfs.html) and videos can have a logo embedded throughout.

3. Personalise the content – If you have the time, you can set a unique password and/or brand a PDF document with a customer’s name too – that way, the customer will know that if they share the document, it can easily be traced back to them. NOTE: You could add a notice stating that the PDF is tracked to the reader. This works like a fake security camera protecting a property. people are not sure if they are being filmed ( or, in this case, whether the PDF is being tracked and that is enough to stop them committing an illegal act.)

5. Use specialist publishing sites and services. E.g. Showing videos on Vimeo, or putting audio on podcast apps, embedding written content inside native mobile apps , or you could even send a report to the customer’s Kindle. These services make it that much harder for files to be shared. (Sending a file to someone’s Kindle stops any further distribution although, of course, there is nothing to stop a person re-typing the content (which some people do!).

Ultimately, my advice is to make sure that your content is as well packaged as possible. Yes, some people will try to copy it, but they will be the minority and, if you make it clear that your content is copyrighted and that copying is illegal, the majority of users will respect that.